Skills That A Manager Needs To Excel

By Author: George Freeman
Total Articles: 52
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For managing business effectively, you need to acquire basic management skills, namely planning, organising, leading, coordinating and controlling. These skills enable you to ensure successful organisation of work and resources in a business organisation. These are fundamental skills that a manager needs to excel.

Business management in today’s times comprises five functions – planning, organising, leading, coordination and control. A business can be successful only when all the functions are carried out efficiently.

Let us take planning first. It involves identification of your business objective as well as finding the way to reach it. You take into account the costs that will be incurred and evaluate the time needed to attain that goal. The plan has to be documented and reviewed on a regular basis. The plan clearly lays out how to move ahead step by step to realise the goal with the resources you have. Before finalising your plan, you need to communicate and discuss it with senior employees in your company and accept their feedback if you feel it adds value to the plan.

Once you are ready with the ...
... plan, you need to organise your resources. It includes allocation of work throughout organisational structure. All the departments are told about their specific goals so that the collective goal can be reached. A yearly goal is further segregated into periodic goals to ensure that the organisation is moving on the desired path. Supply of materials needed for business or service is also to be ensured. For instance, workers in a cement factory won’t have much to do if limestone is lacking. Even when it arrives, production will suffer if it is of poor quality. Expertise of human resource won’t be of much use then.

Next comes leadership, which is a primary management skill. A leader develops feelings of confidence and admiration in the subordinates. It is the job of the leader to communicate the policies and plans to the subordinates so that the production is just as planned. A leader needs not only to supervise but also to act as a guide for the subordinates. An able leader gets subordinates to work effectively and efficiently. Leaders must be flexible, quickly adapt to change and encourage these qualities in the team members as well. They should be open to new ideas and provide the subordinates the framework for innovation.

Coordination involves integrating all the activities of an organisation. Effective coordination is important for goal achievement. Coordination helps to make optimum utilisation of resources minimising the conflicts, wastages, delays and other organisational problems. If the activities are not properly coordinated, the people or teams may work at cross purposes unknowingly. Increasing the scale of an operation may increase geographical distance between the members of an organisation, making proper communication even more important.

Control function guides the management in achieving pre-determined goals. It enables a business to take corrective measures to tide over the shortcoming in various fields. The control acts as a check on the performance of individuals and teams in a business organisation.

Thankfully, several reputable institutions are offering programmes on business management in the UK. Conventional as well as online programmes are available and you can get enrolled in any course that you think will help you hone your skills, enabling you add to value to an organisation. Choosing the right programme and institute becomes important in getting full value of your investment.

The author of this article recommends the University of Leicester School of Management that offers expert-designed business management courses in several streams.